Vatican Google-bombed over weekend

The Vatican was Google-bombed over the weekend, with searches for the Holy See directing unwitting punters to a mysterious site called www.pedofilo.com.

The site takes its name from the Italian word for paedophile, and appeared to be unavailable from the UK today.

However, Italian reports suggest it was based in Mexico, and was actually some sort of religious site. Perhaps it is simply a rather half-baked attempt to show child abusers the error of their ways.

Saturday's apparent attack came just days after the Vatican had announced new rules on how it deals with allegations of child abuse by priests and other Church workers. The Vatican has been wracked by accusations that the Church failed the victims of abuse by clerics.

Apparently the Google-bombing problem was spotted by the Vatican itself, and it promptly got in touch with Google.

A spokesman for Google Italy told Italian news agency ANSA that it was not clear what was causing the apparent misdirect.

He said: "I cannot confirm if it is an attack because I have not had any more precise information from the US engineers to understand the nature of the problem."

However, it seemed pretty clear to the rest of the world that this was a case of Google-bombing, something the search giant was supposed to have weeded out ages ago.

Then again, it's not unusual for large organisations which believe they exist on a higher plane than the rest of us mortals to find that dealing with the nitty gritty of every day life is trickier than they think, no matter what your priests/PRs tell the multitude. ®